![]() ![]() Start with Westworld, whose latest season finds the robots in complete control of humankind. These sightings and intertextual seepages-sublimations, clearly, of real-world torments-are too consistent to be coincidental. Three if you count Stranger Things, where it was sighted in earlier seasons. This year alone, black goo-the science-fictional name for the science-factual graphene oxide-has seeped its way into not one but two sci-fi shows, Severance and Westworld. Flying cars! Viscous drug-delivery droids! Elevators from Earth to the freaking space station! “The visions, the predictions of sci-fi writers and tech gurus,” Manchester U announced in a video, “are finally within our grasp.” “It was as if science fiction had become reality,” said a Samsung exec. Immediately, scientists promised us the stars. Translucent but impermeable, and transistorizable to boot. It was as if some alien had handed us the keys to the future. ![]() Technicalities aside: Graphene was a miracle material, a carbonaceous coup. ![]() So it’s obviously got some dimensionality of the third kind to it. Behold: graphene, the world’s first “2D material.” And that’s in quotes because, well, you can still see it with the naked eye. That’s in scare quotes because all they really did, in a now famous example of serendipity in the sciences, was peel a piece of literal sticky tape off graphite-the stuff in literal pencils-and notice, basically by accident, that the residual flakes comprised a single layer of carbon atoms. It got big, oh, 10-ish years ago, around the time when two University of Manchester researchers won the Nobel Prize for “discovering” it. The question is this: What the hell happened to graphene? There is a question, the answer to which could change the world. ![]()
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